They discuss her article, “The Power And Fragility Of Working In Black Media” in the Columbia Journalism Review and Lamont Hill being fired by CNN for his comments on Palestine.

They also discuss whether Michelle Obama’s words on Rev. Jeremiah Wright in her book “Becoming” were a false equivalence.

You can listen to the entire conversation right now in the audio player below. If you prefer to listen on your phone, GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin is available wherever you listen to podcasts — including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and SoundCloud.

Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 49: Jamilah LemieuxPart 1: Jamarlin talks to digital media executive, activist and author Jamilah Lemieux. They discuss her article, “The Power And Fragility Of Working In Black Media” in the Columbia Journalism Review and Lamont Hill being fired by CNN for his comments on Palestine. They also discuss whether Michelle Obama’s words on Rev. Jeremiah Wright in her book “Becoming” were a false equivalence.

This is a full transcript of the conversation which has been lightly edited for clarity.

Jamarlin
Martin: You’re
listening to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin. We have a go hard or go home approach
as we talk to the leading tech leaders, politicians and influencers. Let’s
GHOGH! Today we have Jamilah Lemieux, the magic maker, a writer, speaker, also
an activist in our community. Welcome to the show.

Jamilah
Lemieux: Thank
you. Thank you for having me.

Jamarlin
Martin: Tell
us a little bit about your background and how did you get into digital media
where you’ve been in the game for a while?

Jamilah
Lemieux: I
am originally from Chicago. I went to Howard and I studied theater there, and
declaring acting as my major definitely came as a surprise to my friends and
family. Folks said, “You’re a great writer. Why aren’t you majoring in
communications or PR or English, something related to that.” And I was
like, no, this is what I want to do. And I made a promise to my parents that I
wouldn’t be a starving artist, that I would teach if acting didn’t happen for
me immediately and before I even finished school, I got into teaching. I was
like, okay, I’m not going to pursue theater. I just didn’t have the courage and
belief in myself. Did education and worked in and around that space for a
while, my heart wasn’t there. During that time I started a blog called
“Beautiful Struggler”, which I got serious about it, if you will, in
2007. So right before I graduated from college and within a couple months I
realized I really liked writing and I liked communicating with people online
because this was back in the days of MySpace and everyone’s blog ended in
blogspot.com and comments sections were not things to be avoided. They were
treasured. It was a great opportunity to talk to other people. There were a
number of us who…

Jamarlin
Martin: So
you were blogging before it was cool?

Jamilah
Lemieux: Yeah.
I was definitely an early adopter with social media in a lot of ways, relative
to some of my friends and relative to some other really talented writers I know
that kind of had to learn the internet after the fact, where there were some of
us that had been in that space for a long time. But I think back to when I
started blogging, folks like Damon Young and Panama from “Very Smart
Brothas” and Demetria Lucas, and Jozen Cummings. I’d say about half of us
were traditionally trained journalism graduates and the other half were people
like myself that just liked writing. Just kind of found their way into it. And
so from there I ended up getting a job with Ebony. I was part of the team that
launched their website in 2012. I was there for almost five years and had a lot
to do with the reimagining of the brand and bringing it into the modern day,
before it’s current set of challenges. If you will. And then after that I did a
two-year stint at InteractiveOne. I was the VP of news and men’s programming.
And prior to having those jobs, which were both great experiences, I learned so
much about digital media and I would like to think that I’m part of a group of
editorial thinkers and leaders that really kind of defined how my generation
and folks a little bit younger than us and a little bit older than us use the
internet to talk about issues of race, gender, sexuality, identity really. And
did a whole lot of freelance writing before and a bit during those two jobs and
got the opportunity to speak at a lot of schools and be on a few cool TV shows
and radio shows and a lot of podcasts. And last summer I was at a moment where
I realized that the more my career trended upward on paper, the less happy I
was in this space. Digital media as you know, is incredibly difficult. There’s
still a lot of questions about sustainability.

Jamarlin
Martin: It’s
a depression. It’s a super hard game right now.

Jamilah
Lemieux: Yeah.
And it’s so much that the priority is around clicks and revenue as opposed to
quality, of substance. And I really just want to make work of substance and I
want to write again. And so I am now full time freelance. I’m working on a book
and a television pilot and I’m also doing some communications consulting
because I learned so much in that space and things that I can help or have
helped brands and individuals and political campaigns with, but I’s untethered
in certain ways now.

Jamarlin
Martin: Do
you hold the duopoly of Google and Facebook who are taking of course, a massive
amount of advertising revenue out of the system, a lot of the advertising of
course, is going to automated systems where people like yourself who want to
write about things that they’re passionate about, who want to write about or
critique the establishment or write about helping people or their community
that can no longer be ad-supported. Of course Google and Facebook taking a lot
out of the system, but offering very little. Do you hold these beasts that I
would call them, these tech beast out in California, hold them accountable for
taking so much value and life out of the system where to be a healthy community
you’re going to need quality content and ad-supported content essentially?

Jamilah
Lemieux: Absolutely.
Both platforms, or companies I should say, are a gift and a curse. In so many
ways I think of Google as more significant in terms of the gifts that it offers
and how it has. There are things about that that come from the Google universe,
I think, that improve the quality of our life in ways that Facebook has not.

Jamarlin
Martin: That’s
an important distinction. They don’t necessarily deserve it the same.

Jamilah
Lemieux: No.
Google allows us to access so much information, valid information and
misinformation, and Facebook knowingly trafficked in the spread of
misinformation in some very dangerous ways considering the outcome of the last
political or presidential election. And down ticket races that have happened
before, during and after. So it’s sad. I still use Google and Facebook,
especially Google products. It’s almost impossible to divorce yourself from
them entirely. At least Google. I think there’s so many great things about
Google, but we’re still figuring out what monetization looks like for content
creators. And that’s part of the reason that I don’t want to be in the business
in that way again. I didn’t feel that I should continue to be in management or
running sites because I’m not the person who has the gift of really
understanding how to make these things make money. Now I know what good quality
content is. I know how to produce it on a dime, I know how to produce it with
the budget. Again, to sit in the leadership role in this space you really have
to think about the money in ways that I would prefer not to.

Jamarlin
Martin: Yeah.
So with the rising inequality in America specifically, I think it could be
explained in part where the folks like yourself and other content creators,
they’re creating content, let’s say on Youtube. And so you create a lot of
content that consumers love, but Google does not pay the content creator enough
to compensate for their time to make a living. However, Google may share 30
percent with the content creator, but the real value is not in the revenue
share. The real value that they’re pimping off the content creators is going to
the share price. So as Google’s share price goes up towards $1 trillion, that’s
on the backs of a lot of the media partners, the content creators. And so
they’re getting just a very little piece of that advertising piece. But that’s
not necessarily the real value. The value is being shifted to the shareholders
and essentially, you have a problem that we’re facing. You wrote a beautiful
piece that I saw online called “The Power and Fragility of Black
Media”. And I read a point of view, and being in the digital media
industry, that’s not appreciated in our culture. Meaning that you knew that
there were problems in Black media in terms of hey, people getting paid late or
this is out of place and this and that. But you had a certain sympathy in terms
of hey, the same website, may be producing business content, they may get a $50
CPM or advertising revenue per thousand impressions, but this Black Company is
getting $20 and you want to compare the Black media who has to fight these
battles and get less for the same thing. You want to compare them to New York
Times and compare them to other outlets, and that kind of nuance is not really
out there or talked about. Can you talk a little bit about what inspired you to
write that piece?

Jamilah Lemieux:
Sure and
thank you. I was actually approached by the Columbia Journalism Review for a
package that they were doing about the lack of diversity in newsrooms and what
it’s like to be the only Black person in one. And I said that has not been my
experience. But because I’ve been very deliberate throughout my career, there
were certainly times especially, I was at Ebony for five years and was able to
amass a certain amount of visibility in the business. This was back when NBC
had black folks on every hour, and I was one of them. So other opportunities
with white-owned, white-led media companies certainly came my way. But I was so
committed to staying in Black media for a number of reasons. And one of them
being that I didn’t have to check my culture or my identity at the door and I
didn’t have to explain it to people either. Trayvon Martin gets killed, we’re
all upset, Mike Brown gets killed, we’re all upset. Trump is elected.
Everybody, for the most part in the office is feeling unsettled or scared. And
I still would say I’m unwilling in any sort of full time capacity and have
certainly done freelance and done projects for other spaces but would not,
knowing what I know about the insides of Black media companies and the two that
I worked for were among either the largest or the best known. Again, just like
you said, advertisers do not value them even when they have the impressions or
the subscribers or the circulation rates of their competitors or others similar
spaces I should say that are designed for mainstream or non-Black audiences
that advertisers don’t treat them the same way. So beyond saying, we’re not
going to give you the same amount of money that we would to say Architectural
Digest or Vanity Fair, which are super niche, they don’t have high circulation
rates. This is not just for mainstream audiences. This is for affluent
audiences, right? But people want to spend a lot of money with those brands
because they’re reaching consumers that are high dollar, you could argue. But
also because they’re not doing Black content. They’re not talking to Black
people. But beyond the lack of money, there was also this idea that Black
content was harder to manage, that it was more controversial. So anything
related to sex with scary for advertisers.

Jamarlin
Martin: Brand
safety.

Jamilah
Lemieux: Yeah.
Right. Brand safety.

Jamarlin
Martin: It
would be policed differently, is that what you’re saying?

Jamilah
Lemieux: Yes.
Policed very differently. I remember Jezebel years ago, back when it was part
of Gawker Media Network of course, had a column called “Pot
Psychology” where a young white, gay male writer and a young white female
writer would get high on marijuana and answer reader advice questions. And it
was hilarious. They did it on camera and there was a written portion to it, I
believe. And I just remember thinking, we could never go there in our wildest
dreams. Vice does a lot of content around pot. And I remember, fast forward to
2017, I did something marijuana-related for my last employer. And internally
there was some serious discomfort. There were some concessions that had to be
made and overwhelmingly there was a sense, I shouldn’t say overwhelmingly, but
there were a number of people above my pay grade and I was the VP so I wasn’t a
junior employee, that felt that we were doing something destructive or
inappropriate in terms of the ability to sell the brand, not necessarily from a
moral standpoint. But this is in the era of marijuana legalization and
decriminalization measures across the country, and it’s becoming a part of pop
culture beyond what it was in the 70s when you would call it a punchline
really. “All the hippies are smoking”. It’s becoming normalized, but
for us and something that people are using for medicinal reasons, and this
wasn’t just a fun celebration of weed. This was about the social justice
implications of decriminalization and legalization, the financial opportunities
that exist for communities that have been targeted by the war on drugs and the
medicinal properties in addition to the social enjoyment or whatever. But the
idea that cannabis represents something that we need to take seriously and a
lot of us need to reevaluate our attitudes about it, even if we choose never to
indulge in it. And so that was not a clear, unequivocal, yeah, we need to do
this because this is where the people are right now. We need to make sure that
our audiences are getting that information, that there was fear that this cost
us money. It just really spoke to the limitations of being in Black media
spaces.

Jamarlin
Martin: You’re
one of the few people who spoke out when CNN fired Marc Lamont Hill over his
support for Palestine.

Jamilah
Lemieux: Yes.

Jamarlin
Martin: And
it’s something that I still talk about today. Why don’t people understand, it
seems like, that’s a big issue, meaning that if we have the people who are
actually courageous to speak out on these issues and we allow the mainstream
media and the establishment elite forces in the society to suppress your
activist such as Marc Lamont Hill, Tamika Mallory, these forces, if you allow
them to crack down on your activist, the courageous folks, these forces can
optimize the community in a way where you’re only allowed to talk about MAGA.
You’re only allowed to bang against MAGA. You’re only allowed to be vocal about
issues that we approve of. And I feel like they have us in a box, where they
want us to stop talking about foreign policy and they had that same view with
Dr. King with Vietnam. But can you talk about what’s so frustrating in terms of
how that went down with Marc Lamont Hill?

Jamilah
Lemieux: Absolutely.
And full disclosure, Marc is one of my dearest friends. So I was bothered by it
as a Black woman, as somebody who works in media, as somebody who has opinions
that are not always in alignment with the mainstream and who knows how easily I
too can be silenced. But I was also of course offended as his friend, and as
someone who understood what he was saying. And it’s not that I think he’s
incapable of saying something inappropriate or wrong, but what he said was
taken out of context and used to portray him as someone who he’s not. And I
think it’s important that we call that out when we see it because it’s
dangerous and it doesn’t matter if this person shares your viewpoints or not.
For me, it was less about what he said and defending the point that he was
making, than it was saying, look at what they’re doing to him and why. Marc has
been radical, and a radical leftist for a long time in terms of his thinking.
But this is a scholar, and an activist, but this isn’t someone who was calling
out for some sort of war like measures or violence. He was saying, look, we’re
not going to see peace in this region until certain things change. And I think
we should respect the right of people to feel otherwise. But to silence him, to
remove him from the largest platform. Cause Marc always had a hundred jobs, but
to take away the largest platform that he has when other commentators on the
network have said things that were equally as perhaps incendiary, but in the other
direction opposing…

Jamarlin
Martin: You
mean against Palestinians and Muslims.

Jamilah
Lemieux: Right.
Islamophobic things, anti-Palestinian sentiment, or having relationships with
people that espouse those views and then to see young Black progressives be
spanked for standing with Palestine, it’s unconscionable.

Jamarlin Martin:
Do you
believe that Tamika Mallory’s situation should be in the same issue of
censorship of Black voices who step out that box? Particularly as it relates to
Palestine and the foreign affairs of America.

Jamilah
Lemieux: I
think that Linda Sarsour of the Women’s March is Palestinian and has been a
vocal opponent of Zionism for the entirety of her activist career. And that’s
something that has led the Women’s March organization to be targeted for
protest. And again, I’m not denouncing the opposition to the way that these
three people feel. It’s just that taking away or condemning them for it.
Closing doors to them, closing platforms to them.

Jamarlin
Martin: Cutting
checks. Trying to take away their ability to take care of their families
because they side with Palestinians. And the way I feel is the American
establishment, they have Black America in a box where we don’t care if you talk
about Donald Trump, we don’t care if you just keep on protesting Donald Trump.
But these are the issues where if you see MAGA over in Palestine, if you see
MAGA in terms of Netanyahu in the far right in Israel, the United States has a
far right and Israel has a far right. And the president of Israel is on that
far right. But I think there’s a lot of deceit among Democrats and liberals
were, hey, if you can bang against MAGA in the United States, why can’t you
bang against MAGA in Israel? Why are things so different? We’re talking about
principles, values, and white supremacy, but there’s so many people who are
scared to talk about MAGA when it’s over there in Palestine.

Jamilah
Lemieux: Right.

Jamarlin
Martin: Rev.
Wright. I know this is coming out of the blue. No one has been talking about Rev.
Wright. However, there was a article in the Huffington Post where the writer
titled This story, “Jeremiah Wright Knew What America was Becoming”.
The Obamas can’t see what it is. And of course, Michelle Obama’s book,
“Becoming” came out last year. It did extremely well, but there’s a
passage in the book, some people are taking issue with the false equivalency
where she compares Rev. Wright’s statements where she says she wasn’t in those
sermons. Although they’d been following Rev. Wright for 20 years, and he
baptized the kids and married them. Michelle Obama says, “Hey, look, we
weren’t at those sermons that you guys are talking about”, but let me use
words to make sure I don’t take this out of context. “We had lived for years
with the narrow mindedness of some of our elders having accepted that no one is
perfect, particularly those who come of age in a time of segregation. Perhaps
this had caused us to overlook the more absurd parts of Rev. Wright’s spitfire
preaching. Even if we hadn’t been present for any of the sermons in question,
seeing an extreme version of his vitriol broadcast in the news though, we were
appalled. The whole affair was a reminder of how our country’s distortions
about race could be two sided. That the suspicion in stereotyping ran both
ways.” How does that make you feel, where white supremacy and Rev.
Wright’s statements can be put in the same box?

Jamilah
Lemieux: I
love Michelle Obama dearly. My relationship to her is certainly less
complicated than it is to her husband. She’s not a politician, but that passage
which I did read, as it starts to make the rounds, really disappointed me. I
think a lot of us had hoped that when they left office that she would be
unfiltered in certain ways. And she has been to some extent. And there’ve been
things that she’s said off the cuff and just let her hair down and talked about
some of her discomforts in the White House and some of her thoughts around the
current administration, but I really would have thought that both or either of
them in their memoirs would exonerate Rev. Wright and talk about why they did
not feel they were able to defend him as it was happening, which was an
understandable concessions in me in certain ways. But now that you’re outside
of that situation, there are no more races to run. You’re no longer in office.
I’d have hoped that she would have been, not forgiving per se, but just clear
on the hypocrisy of comparing him to hate groups and racists. And I think I’ve
come across other class mobile Black folks that achieve a certain level of
success and wealth that disconnects them. And we certainly see it in
celebrities, where even if it seems like in so many ways their hearts and minds
are with the people, they still have a level of, I don’t want to just say
optimism, but maybe naivety or disconnect from what it means to be Black for
the rest of us. And so even if you don’t agree with the vitriol, it’s hard to
understand why someone is learned as she is, or as he is, would not completely
at least understand and respect the sentiment.

Jamarlin
Martin: From
our perspective, when I hear Barack Obama speak and he started going to
Wisconsin, you can go to Youtube and he starts saying, “You’ve been
hoodwinked. You’ve been bamboozled.” I knew then that there was something
in him where, in my opinion, he was one of us when I heard him and he had a
grin where it’s like I’m playing on a level where a lot of these white people
don’t know. And then I read his book and he talked about how he liked reading
“Final Call” and this and that. Some of us I think can live with
Obama saying, look, for me to go to the White House, I got to distance myself
from some of this stuff. Meaning that for me to be embraced by a racist
country, I need to part ways with certain stock from a military strategy,
political strategy perspective can live with. But the way you do that, to your
point in terms of your pastor of 20 years, this is the south side before the
White House. Michelle Obama looks like somebody else, or you think that’s not the
publisher?

Jamilah
Lemieux: I
don’t know the ins and outs of the process of her book coming together. I
wonder was that a concession, there’s still that desire to hold on to, you
didn’t really mean this did you? Did you fight over, we can leave this in, one
of these things has to go and you’d rather talk about something else that
might’ve bothered people and to clean that up. As someone who’s from Chicago
and did not grow up in the church, but Rev. Wright is and was such an important
figure in the community, as is Trinity Baptist Church. It was because of their
college tour that I was able to go visit Howard as a junior and confirm what I
thought I knew, which was that I wanted to be there more than anything else in
the world when I graduated high school. The ways that he and Father Michael
Pfleger and other members of the religious community in Chicago, including Mr
Farrakhan have put their differences aside and rallied together in response to
the violence in some of our communities and some of the terrible racism, the
Midwestern racism that folks weren’t really familiar with until Mike Brown was
killed in Ferguson. I just think that he deserves so much better than that. And
I would have rather that she didn’t address it at all and had to deal with the oversight
then to continue to double down on this image of him as some… I even wonder,
she said she wasn’t there for those sermons and it’s totally possible. It’s
certainly a lot of Black middle class folks that come to church for holidays,
they get there when they can get there, but they didn’t always. But I wonder
when she says that image of him on TV didn’t look like what she knew. And I
wonder, maybe you were there and you didn’t realize that you were there.

Jamarlin
Martin: I
didn’t read the whole passage, but she said she didn’t realize she didn’t catch
some things, but that’s hard for me to believe. Obama said in his book he used
the buy the “Final Call”, Obama has read in my belief, so much
Malcolm X, when he went out campaigning, he’s using Malcolm X’s words. Some of
the Republicans were right to identify Barack Obama that he had a knowledge of
self. They knew that he wasn’t your average Black man running for office. I
think they picked up that this guy had a knowledge of self. He was one of us. I
cannot reconcile that you didn’t know Rev. Wright was about that life. There’s
multiple videos in terms of speaking out against America, speaking out against
white people.

Jamilah
Lemieux: Oh
No. I guess what I’m saying is I don’t think she realized it was a problem
until someone else told her it was. She might have sat there and nodded her
head, because that’s how older Black folks, especially in a lot of Black folks
her age speak. And she might have sat there and been nodding and understanding
it and totally getting it, but through this new lens and maybe it’s a new lens
that she had to adapt to serve as the first lady of the United States. I would
never want to hold any sort of political office. I wouldn’t want to date
someone who had those ambitions or who does, simply because I know I can’t put
aside my identity as a Black woman. There’s certain concessions and things that
they had to make and do and hands they had to shake and people they had to sit
next to, and I could never do those things. I can never.

Jamarlin
Martin: You
don’t think you can make the compromises?

Jamilah
Lemieux: Absolutely
not, no.

Jamarlin
Martin: They
have a $20 million check, they want you to write, hey, when Black people speak
out against white people, it’s just like white people speaking out against
Black people trying to get the boot off our neck.

Jamilah
Lemieux: I
mean, as long as there’ no clause in the contract that says two weeks later, I
can’t be like, just kidding.

Jamarlin
Martin: Yeah.
So I’m a fan of Michelle Obama, I’m a fan of the Obamas. However, I don’t want
to isolate this, but, whether it’s Marc Lamont Hill or this passage, there’s a
sentiment in America and some of our people are picking up where if the former
slave speaks out and the pain and suffering and the trauma that we’ve been
under in the hells of North America, that when we speak out, you may hear some
cuss words, you may hear some bad words, but this is a former slave speaking
out who’s tired of the denial of freedom, justice and equality. So if we speak
out and use words like cracker or something else, it’s different then a Donald
Trump, a Steve king or that hiring manager at Google where they have all the
power to enforce ideologies, but when Black people are speaking out in terms of
activism, fighting for freedom and justice and equality, that’s different, we
can’t be under the same law, in my opinion. In terms of this false equivalency
where, hey, if you say this about a white person, that’s just like the Google
executive or the Wells Fargo executive saying it.

Jamilah
Lemieux: Yeah.
I think it’s always been that way. That both sides-ism Trump of famously put a
spotlight on when he said there’s good people on both sides, talking about
Charlottesville after a young white woman had been murdered by somebody who
drove his car into a crowd of protesters with the intention of killing people.
To still say there’s good people on both sides. One, America is so largely
hinged upon the idea that whiteness is inherently good, and so they’ll
identify, “Oh, we’ve got some bad apples, but ultimately, most of us are
good and you all have to prove yourselves as individuals at best and at worst,
none of us are good.”

Jamarlin
Martin: I’m
going to leave Rev. Wright with this. When we look at MAGA, MAGA America, and
you look at a lot of the darkness in America being shown to the world, it’s out
in public. Rev. Wright was right. Rev. Wright, I believe, was on the side of
God when he was making those sermons in terms of he’s telling you, “God
damn America”. The MAGA was here before Donald Trump exposed it and
created a cult. Rev. Wright was shining that light for the people to see, and
of course he was taken out for that, at least publicly. This is part one. Tune
into the next episode for part two. Thanks everybody for listening to GHOGH.
You can check me out @JamarlinMartin on Twitter and also come check us out at
Moguldom.com. That’s M O G U L D O M.com. Be sure to subscribe to our daily
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